I do not gather that even in the worst of times the peasantry were cruelly over-taxed. Bulgaria is not a country like Egypt, where, given a good Nile, the crops are so rich as to make the poorest fellah worth robbing. By hard work and extreme thrift the Bulgarian peasants contrived to earn a living. They had no motive to do more. What little they saved after they had fed and housed themselves was hoarded. Large estates were almost unknown. The peasant had his two or three acres to till; and on their produce he lived in comparative comfort, secured from oppression by his own real or apparent lack of means. When the Russian troops entered Bulgaria as liberators, the common soldiers were astonished to find that the peasants they had come to deliver from Ottoman tyranny were apparently far better off than the ordinary Muscovite Moujik. Thus the mis- govemment to which Bulgaria was subjected at the hands of Turkey did not produce quite as evil effects as might have been expected to result from a vicious system of administration. As an instance of how the system worked, I may repeat a story told me by one of the most eminent of Bulgarian statesmen as coming within his own experience. Some thirty years ago there was a small tradesman at Gabrovo who carried on the business of a tanner, and had laid by a little money. After the fashion of his countrymen, he sent his son to Paris to learn how business was carried on in more civilized countries. After a few years the lad returned home, having acquired knowledge of various new processes in the art of tanning, and persuaded his father to purchase modern machinery and start a tannery after the French model. The scheme was carried out; the factory went on swimmingly, and threatened to drive local competition out of the field. Within a few weeks, however, of the new works being opened the premises were burnt down by Mussulmen in the tannery trade. The tanner was ruined, but had no possibility of obtaining redress. He knew perfectly well who had committed the offence; but the offenders were Mussulmen, and it was idle for him, being himself a Christian, to sue them before a Mussulman tribunal. In consequence he gave up the business and abandoned all idea of introducing improvements into his own trade.
Mahommodan ascendency
Notwithstanding the baleful influence of Mahommodan ascendency, the antipathies between the followers of the Crescent and the Cross seem to me to have been far less keen and embittered in Bulgaria than in most other parts of the Ottoman Empire. At all periods in their history the Bulgarians took their religion less fanatically than other Sclavonic nations. They held rigidly to their own creed and their own ritual, but in the main they lived on good terms with their fellow-citizens who had accepted the religion of the Prophet. I am assured, though this estimate must necessarily be of a very problematical character, that the Mussulman population in Bulgaria never at any time exceeded one-tenth of the whole, and that at the present moment the proportion of Christians to Mahommedans is as fifty to one. Ever since Bulgaria became independent the Mahommedan exodus has been going on steadily. The Tomaks, as the Bulgarians who became converts to Islam after the Turkish conquest are called, have not been oppressed in any way, except during the brief era which followed the War of Independence. In the great majority of instances the Tomaks have nothing to complain of in respect to their treatment by their Christian neighbours. In common with all other Bulgarians, they have prospered with the general development of the national prosperity. Now that the Cross has supplanted the Crescent, the old ascendency of the Tomaks as a dominant caste has disappeared, and they find it difficult to brook being equals where formerly they were superiors. But the main cause of the Tomak exodus is of a religious kind. There is no creed which takes so firm a hold upon the minds of converts as that of the Prophet, and the Tomaks are devout beyond the measure of ordinary Mussulmen. The Mollahs from the Turkish provinces who visit the Mussulman villages, especially during Ramadan, never lose an opportunity of exhorting their co-religionists to quit a country where the Giaour is supreme, where the true faith is not held in respect, and where, in consequence, Allah will not listen to the prayers of those who, of free choice, live and die amidst unbelievers. Appeals of this kind always come home to true sons of Islam ; and every year Tomak after Tomak sells his farms, often at a ruinous sacrifice, and leaves the country of his birth in order to reside once more amongst the people of his own faith.
Trips to Balkan 